King's addictions have been well documented in this series. The Tommyknockers, his previous novel, was written in a haze of cocaine and cough syrup, and reads like it; after its publication, King's wife, Tabitha, staged an intervention. He was to kick his habits, save his family, and then resume writing. When he came back, two years later, it was with The Dark Half, a novel that manages to encapsulate all King's demons – his addictions, his worries about his family life, the ups and downs of his own publishing career – while being unlike anything he'd written before.

The Dark Half is my favourite King novel. It may not be his best, but it's the one that I love most.

When King's angry, less-pleasant Richard Bachman pseudonym was discovered by the reading public, he decided to kill him off, and issued a press release about the fake writer's death. It was a nice touch. In The Dark Half, Thad Beaumont is a writer who has an angry, unpleasant pseudonym of his own: George Stark. The pseudonym is discovered, and Beaumont is forced to kill him off as well. A story runs in People magazine, along with a photograph of a mock burial, a headstone for a man who never existed. "George Stark," the headstone reads, "Not a very nice guy". With King's pseudonym, however, that was that (aside from his own journeys back into the Bachman voice in later novels). For Beaumont, burying this fake man somehow channels him into coming to life. The rest of the novel deals with what happens when Stark comes out of that grave (heralded by the message, "The sparrows are flying again") and enacts a terrible series of killings – killings that inevitably leave Beaumont as the prime suspect.

The plot is one of King's strongest – the idea of your demons becoming real, and hunting you out to enact some grotesque revenge, is a hugely appealing one – and yet what lingers after reading are the ways in which King's own life intrudes upon his fictional work. If Stark is seen as a projection of all of those traits that King saw and hated in himself (anger, pain, addiction, a potential for violence), the work takes on a whole new layer. At the end of the book, when Stark is vanquished, Beaumont's wife leaves him, unable to see the man she once loved past the hate and pain he has brought upon his family. It's possible to see this as a fear that King himself had; that Tabitha, his long-suffering wife, would find herself unable to see the man that she loved for all the mess in their lives.

What stuck with me was that it was about a writer actually writing. Though the writer with demons is an essential King trope, this book feels as though it's about an actual, working writer: somebody with a career. For better or worse, when I was a teenager I saw Thad Beaumont as an aspirational figure; a man who was doing what I wanted to do. I once rewrote The Dark Half – don't laugh – across 17 pages, abridging it into a short story in an attempt to understand how King did it. Even the excerpts of Stark's writing – about an even nastier man than the faux-author, called Alexis Machine – tied into the main story. Stark's writing was Beaumont's writing was King's writing. If Alexis Machine was Beaumont's darkest moment, so too was it King's.

In my first edition of the novel, the cover proclaims The Dark Half to be King's "masterpiece". It's not heralded as one of his great novels now, and I think that's hugely unfair. It's a deeply personal book, intimately bound up with the creative process, and yet also presents a gripping, and almost grotesquely dark story to rival any other that King has written.

Connections

The Dark Half introduces Sheriff Alan Pangborn, who will later reappear in Needful Things – another hugely underrated book – and Bag Of Bones. (And, thanks to Pangborn's reappearance, we discover the true ending of The Dark Half: that, when Beaumont's wife leaves him, he ends up killing himself.)